I've traded my desire.
I used to crave the tannin-red or mud-brown water of a creek, and a flat rock where I could lay in the sun with a book. I first remember discovering this rejuvenating combination of sun, stone, water, and words about fifteen years ago in a gorge of hemlocks I had trekked to along Maryland's Gunpowder River. Certainly I had united with those first three elements--sun, stone, and water--many times before but on this day I had in my hand a heavy tome: three novels by Thomas Hardy bound as one, and I was deep into Tess of the D'urbervilles. I selected a giant cube of a rock, one of many that made the water there run deep and narrow. The rock was a perfect mattress and pillow, a reservoir of heat; my raised and open book, a parasol. I listened to the water and read as Tess took all of life's hardest blows: poverty, rape, death, lost love. I laughed when Tess and Angel, escaping town after Tess commits murder, happened upon Stone Henge: it just seemed so contrived. But there I lay on my own stone monument. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't taken up in her downward spiral, like the branches disappearing in the whirlpool below me. I would be lying if I said I wasn't shouting yes! and no! to her at all those points when life seemed to offer choices. Perhaps she couldn't hear me, I thought, over the sound of the water.
But now I crave a small, still pool and the bridge above it, a tiny kettle lake that wasn't filled for the first six years I hiked this segment of Wisconsin's Ice Age Trail but now is, thanks to a cyclically rising water table. The pool is just down from the parking area--a square of mown grass in a hayfield--but I hike to it from the other end of the trail so it feels like I'm three miles in. I lay on my stomach on the warm boards, which heat more quickly than stone but cool more quickly too. My chin on my hands, my elbows and hair dangle over the bridge's edge. I stare into the algae green water, at water boatman and whirligigs and all the mosquito larvae that will make this pastime unbearable in a month except on extremely windy days, when the metamorphosed adults will not be able to alight on me. Last week, as I stared, what looked like a large and purple beetle unwound itself from a mass of algae and underwater grasses, but it was actually a salamander's head; he came to the surface, took a breath, then took cover again, repeating this process every ten minutes. I read here too, but mostly nonfiction now: memoir after memoir after memoir, each life told in retrospect, so there is nothing to say in this silent place, no advice to give, though like the hooves of the deer that leave their deep prints all along the shore, I am totally absorbed.
So it's sun and wood and water and words now, and it's just as good.
